Modern digital communication networks allow the transmission and receipt of information even between far flung users. For example, although educational content has traditionally been delivered by using a combination of lecture, self-study, and one or more of physical classroom and face-to-face educator interaction and testing, due at least in part to the proliferation of alternative content delivery systems provided by digital technologies recent efforts in education and non-educational decision making are being tried. Some of these new methods involve students or users learning selected background materials independently and replacing classroom lectures with an educator-facilitated student-to-student “interactive” environment or video-conferencing. Yet, none provide advancements in the quality of what is being communicated.
To be sure, digital media have fostered many new innovations, one of which is distance learning, or so called e-learning, and another of which is video-conferencing. While these methods provide several ways of delivering and exchanging content to students or users, they are less successful, however, at providing even the kind of interactive group learning allowable in physical, face-to-face classroom-based teaching or face-to-face conferencing.
While digital capabilities promise an efferent way of educating students or making decisions, in their current forms, and with current attempts, resultant useable student knowledge and/or sound decisions will likely continue to wane. In the quest to use them, deep and functionable understanding of the subject matter is being replaced by memorization of disjointed data sets and aggravating misunderstandings (often by e-mail). There is also a failure to instil or facilitate social and human-to-human interaction skills, creating a workforce with factual knowledge but little ability to innovate and/or problem solve.
It would be desirable to provide a more effective method of distance learning or decision making, which enhances and increases knowledge.